Charles Trochu

Charles Trochu (1898-1961) was a French far-right politician who served as President of the Municipal Council of Paris from November 1941 to 1943.

Biography
Charles Trochu was born in Chile in 1898 to a Breton father and Basque mother, a descendant of General Jean-Baptiste Kleber and the grandson of General Louis Jules Trochu. Trochu served in the French Army during World War I and was wounded, captured by the Germans, and later decorated. During the Interwar period, he became a wholesale cod merchant, and, despite coming from a Bonapartist background, he came to support the fascist Action Francaise party; he called Jews "the scum of the orient." In 1934, he became an executive committee member of the conservative Democratic Republican Alliance party. In 1935, he was elected to the Paris municipal council for the Auteuil quarter, serving until 1941, when he became President of the Municipal Council. During the Spanish Civil War, he actively recruited Frenchmen to serve in Francisco Franco's right-wing nationalist armies. During World War II, Trochu was not entirely supportive of the Vichy France regime, as he pushed for French independence. He was removed from office in 1943, and he was dropped from the council on 10 June 1944, shortly before the Liberation of Paris. During Philippe Petain's trial in 1945, he testified in Petain's favor and claimed that he had nothing but admiration for the communists, whom he had despised since the 1930s. He died in 1961.